AMD's "Never Settle" bundles may be selling the company's discrete GPU lineup, but it's not leaving its APU lineup lying down. Starting next week, and running up to the end of Q3 2013, AMD will be bundling select A8 and A10 series desktop APUs with Origin-redeemable codes for SimCity, the season's hottest strategy game. Among the eligible models are A10-5800K, A10-5700, A8-5600K, and A8-5500. The freebie bears a staggering US $60 market value, tied with processors starting at $80, leading up to $130. In its marketing slide, AMD pointed out how the Radeon HD 7000D series graphics cores of these APUs outperform similarly priced Intel Core i3 chips by over 80 percent, in the game.

So I guess SimCity replaced Nexuiz as the unloadable title AMD gets tossed to sell with their goods. Oh well...I'm sure it will work. There is always a few people who haven't been warned or heard of the horror that is SimCity and Origin.

So I guess SimCity replaced Nexuiz as the unloadable title AMD gets tossed to sell with their goods. Oh well...I'm sure it will work. There is always a few people who haven't been warned or heard of the horror that is SimCity and Origin.

I may be wrong, but isn't Starcraft a real time strategy game? If that's true then "hottest strategy game" can only mean it can straight from the fiery bowels of the devil.

Let's assume that EA's marketing is being honest. Sim City is not, in fact, a strategy game and it is an MMO because of the required online components. Technically then, Sim City is a hot game. It's easy to say that when there is no competition relating to new games yet released this year.

I'm bitter. AMD is foolish for picking up Sim City, because they are linking their name with a PR nightmare. If you want to move units then try linking your hardware to games people actually enjoy hmm....bioshock...hmmm. Linking a decent piece of hardware to a rather despised game is...only viable as a course of action if your sales team has been hiding under a rock for the last two months.

Oh baby! I got a client fixing to replace ~15 machines with A10-5800K boxes that I will be building. Looks like I'm gonna be swimming in SimCity codes, sounds like a nice little bit of side $$$ to be had, going into my build-me-a-new-rig fund.